Surprisingly, many of the lessons I've learned over the years have little to nothing to do with designing buildings. That doesn't mean they weren't worth learning.

Reflection

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

The Price of a Hot Dog

My first full-time job in the
field was two minutes away from the GeorgeWashingtonBridge
and New York City. The latter half of the 1990’s saw tremendous
growth in our industry and I quickly began to see my friends jump from firm to
firm, unassumingly to advance their career.
This was particularly true in Manhattan
where there are more architects than panhandlers, at least in the post-Giuliani
era.

My job at the Japanese
company was okay, but actually the Japanese economy was hitting a financial correction. As a result, the work for Japanese
automakers, finance companies and manufacturing plants in the U.S. was
slowing. So I was a little wary,
although I was not actively pursuing any other potential employment at the
time.

Then one day I got a phone
call and an invitation to lunch from Gregg Scott. I had spent the previous summer as an intern at
RLPS and worked a lot on models and renderings for his projects. So of course I was interested in hearing what
he had to say. So I showed up to his
house on a Saturday in the autumn of 1996.
I am not sure what I expected for lunch, but what I found was a lunch of
hot dogs and potato salad on his patio.

I was not expecting a lavish
lunch, but I could not have been more convinced that I would be hitching my
wagon to a down right, down to earth organization. I don’t know if Gregg saw something in me and
intentionally made that selection, or if he just liked hot dogs, or if I was
only worth the price of a hot dog, but irrespective of the reasoning, it
worked.

That lunch had an effect on
the next 6,000 lunches I have eaten, because for the next 17 years (and
counting), I gave up the more cosmopolitan dishes from New York in favor of the
brown bag style I had grown up knowing.
That was just fine with me, because I was tired of unagi (that’s eel in
Japanese in case you don't frequent sushi shops).